In the introduction to his volume anthologizing writings characterized as texts of “Liberal Islam” from all across the Muslim world, including Indonesia, Charles Kurzman identified a central preoccupation of liberals without orthodox religious education as being that of “who may speak,” or who holds the legitimate authority to exercise ijtihād. This description could in fact be applied more broadly to nearly all of the major figures discussed in chapter 5 – as well as to the Islamist autodidacts and modern-schooled reformers in chapters 2, 3, and 4. Such issues of authority on religious matters, however, were configured differently for the scholars whose works will be examined in this chapter, as they had formed their understandings of Islamic law within the milieu of pesantren education and were deeply immersed in the texts and interpretive praxis of traditional Muslim scholarly authority.

As discussed in chapter 1, pesantren and the orientations toward Islam which they preserved and disseminated had been the target of a series of Muslim reformist critiques in Southeast Asia since the turn of the twentieth century.